Mind, Body, Earth, Community :: Essays On Attention Paid
It is the right brain, McGilchrist tells us, that is capable of understanding context and developing a meaningful narrative about it. It is the right brain that can situate itself in space and time, and understand the narrative that is the mind and body interacting with the earth and the cosmos. It is the right brain that can grope towards truth and meaning through experience, and in league with a community of individuals.
Winds Blowing Us Back Home - by Rhyd Wildermuth
Fortunately, it is mostly only a matter of remembering, and it’s most often all joy. What is it like to grow a bit of one’s food at home, rather than shop for it in garishly-lit warehouses? What does one do without a screen to tell you what to think? How does one meet other humans without algorithmic filters telling you who “likes” you? How do we provide for ourselves without capitalist networks of distribution, or capitalist employment, or capitalist management?
Winds Blowing Us Back Home - by Rhyd Wildermuth
It isn’t the earth that is dying, as it cannot die. It’s carrying on quite well, actually, doing precisely the things the earth does in response to human pressures. It’s responding perfectly fine to our destruction, in the way a healthy body responds to an infection.
The earth isn’t in a state of crisis.
We are.
Albert Camus on Writing and the Importance of Stubbornness in Creative Work – The Marginalian
Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.
We are in the last gasp throws of the white patriarchy in my country. Hopefully they don’t succeed in taking democracy down with them.
As I navigate the waters of corporate internet providers I am convinced that a company with a total quality service model could easily eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner. Many people fear Soviet style socialism. It’s hard to see how corporate capitalism is any better sometimes.
Mind, Body, Earth, Community :: Essays On Attention Paid
What is important to the left brain is what’s in front of it in any given moment, and what needs or can be done with it. Self-preservation, utility, and utilization are the name of the game with the left brain.
A recent study at the University of Toronto shows that infants have longer attention spans when experiencing live music. We’re told how much kids love staring at screens, but even video playback doesn’t captivate them as much.
Not surprising, is it? Further evidence that analog cultural interaction is superior.
It is quite a thing to see leading Republicans—including a former president—in mugshots for their assault on our democracy and to know that party leadership supports their actions. Indeed, it is unprecedented, and for those who remember what a grand party the Republicans have been at times in their history—Lincoln, after all, was a Republican, and so were Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower—it is a sad end.
But an end it is. The authoritarians who have taken over the party have abandoned their history and are now building something altogether different.
… indeed…
One of this morning’s baristas is channeling the look of…
Mr. George Whipple (also known as George the Grocer) is a fictional supermarket manager featured in television commercials, radio, and print advertisements that ran in the United States and Canada from 1964 to 1985 for Charmin toilet paper. Typically, Whipple scolds customers who “squeeze the Charmin,” while hypocritically entertaining such actions himself when he thinks no one will notice. The character and catchphrase were created by John Chervokas of the agency Benton & Bowles. Prominent ad-man Sid Lerner also worked on the campaign.
From yesterday…
From yesterday…
Verizon saga continues… largely, my problems have been sorted… but, just now, I received an “Extender” from Verizon… even though I told them I did not need it… since returning the last one caused all my disconnect problems, I think I will put this one in a closet and forget about it.
Mind, Body, Earth, Community :: Essays On Attention Paid
What I learned from Ms. Federici is that capitalism is an organizing force of enormous consequence. Consequence that is brutal and harmful to the mind, body, earth, and community connections I began this post with. It has rearranged the relationships between men, and women, and the earth, in profoundly destructive ways. It has fragmented the world and its creatures into things that, in their thingness, are maximally exploitable. This includes you and me. Divided, everything and everyone is exploited and utility is the quality everything and everyone must have.
From yesterday…
So, Verizon can disconnect your Fios service with a push of a button, but a technician is needed at the house to reconnect it? This makes no sense to me.
Mind, Body, Earth, Community :: Essays On Attention Paid
For the next few weeks, I periodically ran into her and would ask if things had gotten any better. She would say not really, and I would encourage her to hang in there, these runs of frustration and struggle do, eventually, end. I always wished her a better rest of her day as I walked on.
Mind, Body, Earth, Community :: Essays On Attention Paid
Another analog social media app is my daily early morning walk and photograph practice. Often, they are strictly mind-body-earth affairs. Occasionally, they are community affairs, too. I meet people I know. I see people I don’t know, but know them as regulars on the street. Every so often, I learn their names.
From yesterday…
From a couple of days ago…
I have decided to focus on getting out of the house and going for walks (mind, body, earth, sometimes community) and winding up at local coffee shops, where I can have direct human-to-human contact (definitely community). Even if that contact is superficial banter with a barista whose name I know and who knows mine, it’s better than the social media app stand-ins we are plagued with. Even if I know no one, and talk to no-one, I am in a space alive with people interacting analog fashion. The coffee shops are my analog version of social media apps.
Judgment used to be the foundation of the idea of reasonableness–a concept you may remember, but which we are in danger of losing, if we have not already done so, in a mechanised, bureaucratic society.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist
Acquiring a degree of judgment that can make these elements intelligently cohere is–or used to be–the whole purpose of education. It is why we study the humanities. What history and classics and literature tell us is not to be found in the sciences anywhere. Nowadays we seem to have forgotten this crucial insight, on which the future of our civilisation nonetheless hangs.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist
I am discovering that the best calendar app for me may be Apple’s Reminders. It’s ability to apply a date and time to a reminder renders a simple timeline list of events and proposed actions that adjust to each addition of a new reminder.
Went for an early morning hike with the pack…
